'10m girls aborted in India'

Up to 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades after gender checks, according to a study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.

09 Jan 2006 05:29 GMT

The preference for boys has skewed the gender ratio in India

Fewer daughters have been born to couples who have not yet had a boy, according to the study's report published in the Lancet on Monday.

The journal said its researchers studied data on female fertility from a continuing Indian national survey of six million people in 1.1 million households.

Selective abortion

Analysing information about 133,738 births, the researchers found that couples were less likely to have a girl as a second child if their first child was a girl and that the deficit in the number of girls born as a second child was more than twice as great among educated mothers than among illiterate ones.

Based on the natural gender ratio from other countries, they estimated that 13.6 million to 13.8 million girls should have been born in India in 1997.